AltME groups: search

so randomly trashing the db causes a resync?  no more dot spam needed??

I'm getting timeouts here again .. and yesterday it was down for 
a long period.

Slicehost is only $20 a month ...

I keep getting disconnected.  No one interested in a professional 
host??

well. being an account of 10% of posts and not having posted for 
2 months... I guess I am a sizeable part of the decrease... but its 
summer, vacation time, and many of us actually have less questions 
with R3.0 than its earlier releases...  what I find strange is the 
decrease in the number of people posting...

The recent decline in non REBOL related concent, seemingly comming 
from a common accord that we should make the world more REBOL  centric... 
will have made a big difference too.

Will -- one of the biggest AltME annoyances is that it throws away 
what you typed when it has to re-establish a server connection.

That can happen if you have dropouts on your online connection, or 
if the server is busy.

Those of us who have been plagued with the problem have learned it 
takes three keypressed to send any AltME post:
  ctrl+A ;; select all
  ctrl+c ;; copy post to clipboard
  ctrl+s ;; attempt to post

I'm thinking of something that has both a VID/Ext interface and a 
browser interface

The biggest failing with Altme is the lack of a distributed server.

If we don't make sure we have a robust backend .. it doesn't matter 
what the front looks like, we will hit issues.

The other issue is the need to maintain a continuous tcp connection 
to the altme server.  That is a major source of issues.

not sure how Robust R3 chat is. After all - it is just one of possible 
architectures. It is true that I doubt it is much advanced. It is 
good for Chat, even threading, moving threads here or there, ranking, 
etc., but we are imo not following latest developments of distributed 
apps. Some few years ago I read something about Cademlia etc. protocols, 
but not sure what it is all about. OTOH - look at Altme - it is running 
for years. And if its back-end would be DB based, it would be enough 
for a long time probably.

I saw a similar issue with playsite when I used to play games online. 
 Kept on being booted due to crappy internet connections or

Messages can be sent using the SQS once someone has committed a new 
message to the store.

This gives us a backend, search, threading, no centralised server 
requirements, no particular person needing to host a server.

You can build a front end using a browser client or a View client.

I thought about using an IRC server but again this is a single point 
of failure.

I haven't been on consistently for a while, so I haven't noticed 
outages, but nothing is too ambitious for you Graham. :-)

it would be a good idea if he gets time to publish that part of the 
code.

For moderartion purposes is it possible/safe to delete messages from 
a group in an Altme World?

Moderators currently have no ability to do that.
 

REBOL.org can blank posts on its archive, if requested with a good 
reason:
http://www.rebol.org/aga-groups-index.r?world=r3wp

These guys have been working on this for two years! WIth google resources? 
I guess ity takes a long time to make these thypes of apps when you 
are wedging technology not really ment to do it.

I'm not that impressed...(18 min. in to preseentation anyway...

I'm using Google Wave at the moment (in Safari not Chrome) and it 
offers a *bit* more than AltME in a browser.

*bit* as in "The moon is a *bit* further away from us than the local 
supermarket".

I just tried security essentials on one pc and it claimed to find 
a Trojan in one of the AltMe chats.
Anyone with the same experience?

I can't go two minutes today without having to force a refresh...

Pekr, welcome to my world.  I eventually gave up complaing about 
it and found the occurences to be far less frequent when I went down 
to a single world being hosted on my home PC.

This is the first time I lost my world and one has been running no 
problem for over a year...

It was not enough in my case. Even if I have my first world running 
= 5400 port occupied, when I started another one on 5401, altme.com 
registered the second one on 5400 too. The trick is to prevent altme.com 
to get access to your 5400 port (first world) for a while, by disabling 
DST NAT on your router for a while. At least it was my case.

in any case the server its hosted on, should just scan the process 
list and restart it automatically when it falls...  maybe its a network 
issue... which makes the service unreachable.

It's a server issue ...

Or post a request on their behalf into the
   Accounts
group.

We need their name, and email address (to send the join message to 
them)

is there a non member form which people can use on rebol.org to get 
access here?

its not for a specific person... but if I add support information 
for remark and provide altme as a resource... I want them to be able 
to get a user without being a reboler.

No....because that form would have to ask for an email address, then 
we'd have to verify it wasn't just a drive by spamming, etc....Too 
much hassle at our end.

ok, I'll probably build a form on my site for them to request an 
altme user/password.  with email verification of course.

When I was running multlple worlds it seemed like every month or 
two it would occur.  Then I shut down my seldomly used worlds and 
the I didn't get the problem for many months, and have only had it 
happen once or twice in the last year to year and a half.

amacleod -- it looks like AltME.com's world server went down for 
a time yesterday.
Could that have knocked your worlds out of orbit?

Does paying the register fee (to protect the world name) make a difference?

There's an old issue I hit again recently, where new connections 
to the world can't be made, but existing sessions still work. Restarting 
the world from a shortcut doesn't work to solve it. You have to start 
AltME and choose 'Start a World'.

Anyone else seen a trojan warning for AltMe pop up in their antiv 
virus software? Microsoft Security Essentials just told me that there's 
a virus in one of the AltMe chat files. Any idea how to see to which 
group the file belongs? The file is called 380.set.

380.set is the "Chat (Not web-public)"

It is _unlikely_ to have a virus, as it is basically a text file 
consisting of REBOL blocks (you can load it into a text file to take 
a look) But who knows how clever virus writers are these days?

Yes, I've seen some false positives with REBOL products before.

If you look in the file:
   altme/worlds/rebol3/users.set
you can see the group-id to titles mapping.
Again, just a text file.

Yeah I'm sure it's just a false positive, I wasn't concerned or anything. 
I use Windows only for playing games, it doesn't have access to any 
important files and I use sandboxie for stuff I'm not sure about. 
Before MSE I used AntiVir and that one does report even more false 
positives, pretty annoying. Usually a company can contact anti virus 
software companies about these false positives in their products, 
do you know by any chance if that was done for REBOL in the past?
And thanks for the info about the file/group mapping :)

rebol/sdk also returns a false positive on several virus checkers

The Jan-2008 R3 alpha shows up as a false positive in AVG, still.

The MSE false positive for the chat set was for a javascript exploit. 
Were there any javascript discussions in that chat file?

If it is just a numeric mapping, it would be amusing if the numbers 
involved were also used in a javascript exploit :)

BrianH, I still got the chat  file in the MSE quarantine, I'll take 
a look at it next time I boot into Windows and look if there's any 
javascript code in it. At the moment I don't use it that often since 
Windows 7 keeps rebooting every few hours and messes up my new harddrive, 
seems to be a common problem with Windows 7. And it worked so nice 
for a couple of days, meh.

Heh .. there is a javascript channel here .. maybe someone posted 
some sample code?

damned - once again lost registration for my worlds. This is starting 
to become insane. It is at least 6th case in half a year. This service 
is becoming unreliable ....

Anyway to script some sort of "ping" to check periodically if the 
world still exists?


I hate thinking its been down for hours or days if I have not visited 
for a while.

amacleod - apparently, there has to be some bug. There has to be 
some script/job, which investigates, if the name is free or not. 
That script fails, or simply does not work upon the docs, which say, 
that your world will expire after 10 days. But maybe the logic is 
twisted, maybe such job is being run not on a daily basis, but on 
a 10days basis, and if so, then it is wrong.

Pekr, how did you contact me?  I was not aware that there was a problem 
here.

AltME saves the world-name two ways:


1. When you run your server, it pings the world-name server every 
few minutes to indicate that it's up, and what IP it is using.


2. If you buy a registered world or AltServe, then the world-name 
is locked and cannot be reallocated.


But, that said, there could be a bug!  Please tell me any details. 
 For example, what AltME version, and what platform.

BTW, Safeworlds does not intentionally deallocate names that are 
in use.  So, it's definitely a bug of some kind.

sounds like a good sci-fi title ... "The lost worlds of AltME" ...

$10/year is a really trivial sum ...if it solves the issues.

I too am seeing this a lot today.  Maybe we should get Henrik to 
host this world on linode for us ?  :)

Just for the records, the reason AltME went down last week was a 
hardware failure of the Network card.

So what does it take to host this world somewhere else? At this point, 
I'm almost inclined to pay a little for better service, due to the 
quality of the information that can be found here.

Just a linux box connected 24/7 and an open port

I used to run a backup rebol altme server when it altme used to go 
down for ages at a time but that server is now otherwise occupied.

I use AltMe from a few different computers.
I just observed many messages missing.

It just looks as if messages are disappearing, even ones I am sure 
I wrote and saw already

I agree.


its currently, totally, broken because the server seems to be freezing 
all the time. 

 there is a serious flaw in altme's tcp design.

do we know that? AltME has run fine until about a year ago. Do other 
worlds run off the same servers have the same trouble?

the flaw is in handling the connections errors... altme does everything 
the wrong way.  blanks screens, looses messages, freezes up, doesn't 
properly recover, when just reconnecting to world manually actually 
brings a client back up for a little while.


the server has been noted by Carl as being afflicted by a few networking 
issues, but the server is clearly available in some way, so the server/client 
protocol isn't very fault-tolerant IMHO.

noticed a strange problem.  my altme shows On-line.

then I post... BUT it actually only synced and received posts in 
other groups, and DID NOT post my new message.


after the sync, it still says On-line... yes... there is something 
very screwed up here.

Need to know some things, if I am to try the server on Linode:


- RAM requirements for server with the current REBOL3 world. My server 
has 384 MB RAM and is already doing other stuff.
- Can I run headless?

- Can I make a copy of this world which people can connect to for 
testing? Just to minimize downtime in case it won't work.

I think that last time Carl told that this world is already too big 
and the best way would be to setup a new one.

I don't see how that would help on a periodic networking problem, 
but... oh well.

AFAIK, it was a network problem, not a software problem, so the size 
of the world has nothing to do with it.

when the server is instable, I can confirm its not really better 
even when we are alone in the world.  I checked the last time and 
was the only one here a few times and it was as bad as when some 
of you appeared.

strange - started up altme and ms anti virus reported a trojan virus

must be a false warning

There was discussion about a JS exploit a while ago. It could be 
in that file.

6-May-2008, someone posted a bunch of Javascript asking about SQL 
injection code, could that be it?

possibly - that was a suprise

Fix the permissions of the directory. AltME (like many REBOL programs) 
doesn't act like a proper Windows app, it acts like a portable app. 
It doesn't put its files in the right place for an installed Windows 
app. Vista and 7 are right to complain.

Wouldn't it be "more right" if Vista let the program be a portable 
application, and in fact supported this "correct" way of doing things?

Chrome works like AltME and works just fine with the Windows 2000 
security model. It does this by putting the program and its files 
in the local settings directory, then checking it before running. 
MySpace IM used to do this to allow students to load the program 
onto half-locked-down computers at their schools without getting 
permission from the admins (I was one such admin, so this was annoying), 
but Chrome seems to be much less of a security hole. AltME could 
quite easily work the same way.

The real problem is that no program in some directory under the Program 
Files directory should be putting its data files (or allowing writing) 
to the same directory as the program files. That's a Win9x thing, 
and insecure. If programs that are running outside of the system 
directories run with less privileges, then all the better.

As it is, Win7 (and to a lesser extent Vista) do exactly that kind 
of workaround for bad programs under Program Files, redirecting their 
data files to another ProgramFiles directory under local settings. 
It's tricky, but not as tricky as trying to make the programs secure 
otherwise. However, if you put your program directory somewhere where 
it can't figure out that aliasing, the system has to assume that 
you know what you are doing and you have to act accordingly and fix 
the permissions on the directory to match what you want to do.

Of course, this is all a consequence of user-based security being 
kind of a bad idea in the first place.

The real problem is that no program in some directory under the Program 
Files directory should be putting its data files (or allowing writing) 
to the same directory as the program files.


I don't agree with this.  In fact, I vote that we have sandboxes 
(that are also folders), and a company can do what ever they want 
in their own sandbox.

You get into problems when companies dictate that pre-installed apps 
are on a read only partition, or there is a disk quota.

to me the problem is that MS should have created a real application 
framework... actually, only Apple with OSX seems to be really close 
to this.


there should be THREE root directories and only three dirs for each 
application.  windows has dozens, which is crazy.
1. Application SOURCE data (.exe, libs, datafile, etc)
2. Application STORAGE data (game saves, defaults
3. Application Temporary data, flushed on program quit by the OS.


within Storage, you'd have application and user-based storage and 
that's it.


The os refuses to execute any file not within application source 
dir, so you have already clamped down on a lot of security issues. 
 a list of approved .exe is stored whenever you launch an application 
for the first time.


for a bit more flexibility, several application dirs could exist, 
so that you can do stuff like compile items and run them locally 
within your dev environment, but these dirs would be explicitely 
registered within the os.


on install the Application should be required to ask permission (like 
flash) in how much space will be stored within STORAGE if it exceeds 
a max default, independently of SOURCE.


The implementation of MyXxxx folders is completely horrendous, and 
should be a simple and ubiquitous form that has one entry for each 
media type, and a browser where you want to put your stuff (which 
might not be user-specific).


IIRC this was addressed in Vista, but then they went and added aliases 
to everything, which raises errors in the explorer, cause you can't 
use them.  They alias core windows directories in other languages, 
the result being that explorer and actual disk info are different! 
 this completely fucks up many applications (like rebol).


windows has a hard time "fixing" things... they always just patch 
it... its worse since they have a hard time starting with any good 
implementation of anything to begin with.

I agree with Maxim...


But will extend a concept, which is that there should also be a Shared 
space, for example, where a given application ALLOWs anyone (or specific 
other apps) to change the data.

From what I understand this is only a problem under Windows 7 for 
non-themed applications. Themed applications use a "virtual" location. 
(Perhaps some Windows expert can confirm this).


I guess it is unlikely that AltME will be converted to a themed application.

A hidden legacy filesystem hierarchy with a user-friendly one overlaid 
on top. And the sensible one to use depends on what you want to do, 
but command line tools (like REBOL) can quite easily access both, 
if you know what you're doing.

I hope AltME will support Unicode soon. I have a REBOL Chinese group, 
And I would like to move it here.

Well.. Since Reb2 don't have Unicode it would be really hard to do 
Unicode support into AltME .. After version 3, who knows.. Though 
I have to say that I have no idea of the AltME status. Earlier I 
though it belongs to some 3rd party company that just Used Rebol 
as a devtool.

AltME is sort of "replaced" by R3 chat on R3, in that Carl usually 
doesn't visit this place very often and prefers R3 chat. The practical 
implementation of R3 chat is different and the outcome makes it serve 
a different purpose than AltME.

Some info that I hope clarifies...

1. AltME is from Safeworlds, independent of REBOL Tech.
2. AltME is still being developed, but is waiting for R3.
3. AltME may be updated before R3. So, be sure to report bugs.

4. IOS was traded to Safeworlds. But, it may still be possible to 
get a trial release for users.

5. I use AltME quite often, but I must avoid lengthy conversations 
in order to get work done.

6. R3 Chat is a backend prototype for AltME 3.0 -- which in final 
form will be more like IOS (allow user-built reblets.)

Yes, a blend of AltME and IOS.

I am trying to track down a nasty bug, not a business model

Note that AltME when used as a server must be able to ping port 5500 
at regular intervals. That's how Safeworlds keeps your world registered.

maybe all you need Pekr is a script that pings safeworlds on port 
5500

Pekr doesn't want solutions .. he wants a perrmanent fix

Graham - if I would want a solution, I would pay few bucks for permanent 
registration and be done with it ... = noone would complain about 
apparent bug.